Big Brother Is Watching: IPs Tell the Real Story

Published by Kieron JH, The Reasonable Adjustment

Since our previous post about surge in traffic, The Reasonable Adjustment has received well over 100 visits from anonymised IP addresses, many of which arrived in regular intervals using rotating Cloudflare-routed infrastructure. The pattern strongly suggests deliberate, cloaked monitoring rather than casual or organic browsing.

This behaviour isn’t random. It’s structured, deliberate, and increasingly familiar to those tracking institutional surveillance in digital advocacy.

🧠 What’s Behind the Pattern?

After correlating IP activity, timestamps, and post publication times, the evidence suggests that these visits are part of a deliberate monitoring effort. Key signals include:

• Access spikes shortly after advocacy-related content is published
• Masked IPs that rotate frequently – indicative of proxy or VPN use
• No interaction with site forms, cookies, or content – suggesting passive observation rather than genuine readership

In plain terms, it looks like an entity – or several – are watching closely, but don’t want to leave fingerprints.

🧠 Could It Be a Public Agency?

Possibly. Some of the content on this site critiques the actions of services connected to justice, employment, and social support. It’s conceivable that one or more agencies may be monitoring developments – formally or informally.

Furthermore, the level of technical obfuscation observed – including masked IPs, disabled browser identifiers, and avoidance of analytics scripts – is not typical of public sector infrastructure. While government users do use VPNs, these are generally designed to securely access internal systems, not to anonymise external browsing. Outbound traffic from such systems is usually logged, filtered, and attributable. Most significantly, several of the visits occurred outside standard working hours – including one IP making repeated requests well after 11:00 p.m. This strongly suggests the user was acting outside a typical 9–5 government desktop environment, or was accessing the site through a third-party tool or proxy beyond their organisation’s direct control.

🧠 Could It Be Private Monitoring?

Other likely candidates include:

• Organisations recently named or referenced on this site
• Reputation monitoring firms or PR contractors
• Interested third parties acting proactively to gather insight

Given the precision of the visits, it’s fair to assume the source has a vested interest in staying informed – without leaving a trace.

🧾 Why This Matters

Anonymised traffic isn’t inherently suspicious. But when it arrives in tight, repeating patterns after public criticism or advocacy – and avoids detection by conventional analytics tools – it becomes something more: covert monitoring.

If an organisation wants to observe criticism, it should do so transparently – not from behind digital masks.

This episode reinforces the need for digital self-defence. Front-end stats don’t tell the whole story. Server logs, IP history, and behavioural patterns often reveal far more – especially when someone is watching, but doesn’t want to be seen.

Written by Kieron JH
Founder, The Reasonable Adjustment